Four Poems

Omnipotence

Inside you hides another person, an illusion,
an inhuman casualty of cloud. Aching for accident
he tries to punch you in the face. Still no fucking
stars. Touch the touchscreen, Tinker Bell.
I want a mattress made of doilies.
I want a tulip chair and a rainbow tilting slightly
to the left. I want a window and a secretary
running down a flight of sixteen thousand stained
glass steps to swerve and throw herself into my cab,
then hand me a new body. I want these urns to burst.
I want those icicles to just explode inside your mouth.
And when our song goes viral, I want to eat it raw
in eight inch heels on our new couch watching the ball
drop in Times Square as wide awake as Lady Gaga.

Actualizing the Fundamental Point

And so we work in six-hour shifts in claustrophobic
darkness and often on all fours. It’s safest to handle
whatever you find down there while wearing
disposable gloves, your face painted like a tiger,
no longer the lone neurotic trapped in a bedful
of almost-humans. But why should we stop there,
allowing the danger to stay hidden every time fate
breaks the skin? Curled up in his cozy booth awaits
a well-trained organist perfectly willing to cheer
you up with an elaborate voluntary. Yet some
newly discovered ancestor still powers his way
through the dunes and across a waist-high river
into your ecological niche, scattering bits of Americana
into a hot pink sea, which proves, my little
monkey, that, weak masters though we be, entire
kingdoms might be built upon our leery howls.
A shower of thimble-sized vertebrae cascades
into my lap. But you were my first love and so
such mishaps can’t be helped. Don’t hesitate to
contact me when that last empty-eyed vignette
turns into a sonic scream riding shotgun through
the waves of gravity and nausea. Here’s everything
you need to know about who we might have been
if we had slept in the same bed or if our slender,
curving fingers had embroidered something shrewd
out of the marginalia that filled our tiny skulls.
Even if the curtain sinks back into shallow sediment,
we can proceed to calculate the meaning of it all
with just one simple formula: Given enough time t
and an objective value O, the person doing event
O(E (t)) will either feel fulfilled or she will not,
which means the secret stains your hands before
you even pick it up, even if the cause of death is only
an hypothesis. Even if each masochist can barely poke
it with their stick – it’s right there waiting to amaze us.

The Ocean of Worldly Suffering

What was all the fuss about? You’re still here, angling
your lens to concentrate its rays upon a crumpled
piece of paper that contains your whole life’s work,
written exclusively in vowels that slipped straight out
of Sappho’s unpublished translations without anyone’s
consent. Which thing, exactly, will catch fire is never
up to you. Nevertheless, it should be possible to gently
blow the flame until the melody ignites into an aphrodisiac.
Why bother accenting the nipples when they too will
soon be lost or set adrift or cast aside in anger or disgust?
It’s clear you’ll always be the culprit who eats anything
that crawls or swims or flies or walks or moves.
Each syllable is stressed so you don’t know if it’s a farce
made up entirely of fragments rusting in a pale green tin
or an intellectual history that’s never fully been written,
for the goddess looking on can’t stand to be reminded
of our wretched human lives. But wait – you’re at the peak
of your power! – cutting off the hands and feet, slitting
the hide around the body, looking forward, looking back,
having mastered all the grammar with its endless rows
of teeth. If unpredictable fortuna hadn’t left a single
mark how would you know the hand that hit you?

Dwarf Galaxy

“It would be better if earth were lifeless as the moon”
mused Luna – a young woman who, surprisingly, exists
somewhere in Massachusetts. She has the face of an
auteur and the body of a brutalized non-human animal
forced to satisfy the whim of countless generations
of brute human sufferers with names like Schopenhauer,
Plato, Aristotle, Kant (to take a few examples off the
shelf in front of me). “Suffering exists because it does” –
or so says Luna from the borrowed Honda Civic she’s
been sitting in for weeks, composing reckless letters
to her favorite teacher (saddled with the body of a fox
and the face of Joseph Stalin): “The X-mass decorations
won’t fit beneath the sink; You’ve been trapped in a
meeting since 1833; you need an operation that could leave
you paralyzed; you’re stuck in a bunker without anything
to do while Uncle Joe sits in his office, goat’s milk running
from his nose across the barren territories he purged of his
opponents some eighty years ago – not that anybody’s
counting….”These are the major sub-points listed under
Luna’s claims, none of which (her teacher notes) is logically
derivable from any of the others. Luna bares her fangs
and roles her eyes a little.

__________

Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet. Her publications include Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, which won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books and Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a scholarly book about ancient Roman notions of translation and literary creativity. She was a spring 2020 artist-in-residence with the Squire Foundation.